In the new issue of Regulation, economist Pierre Lemieux argues that the recent oil price decline is at least partly the result of increased supply from the extraction of shale oil. The increased supply allows the economy to produce more goods, which benefits some people, if not all of them. Thus, contrary to some commentary in the press, cheaper oil prices cannot harm the economy as a whole.

Two long wars, chronic deficits, the financial crisis, the costly drug war, the growth of executive power under Presidents Bush and Obama, and the revelations about NSA abuses, have given rise to a growing libertarian movement in our country – with a greater focus on individual liberty and less government power. David Boaz’s newly released The Libertarian Mind is a comprehensive guide to the history, philosophy, and growth of the libertarian movement, with incisive analyses of today’s most pressing issues and policies.

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Tag: military recruiters

Perhaps you remember the case of Ricci v. DiStefano, so much discussed during Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation process? To recap briefly: The city of New Haven had used a written test to determine which of its local firefighters would be considered for promotions. When the tests came back, it turned out that the high scorers were overwhelmingly Caucasian, and so the city—fearing a lawsuit from black and Latino firefighters who hadn’t made the cut—scrapped the results. Not, mind you, because the test was in any way discriminatory on its face, but because federal law frowns on any test that has a “disparate impact” on minority groups unless it can be shown to be both closely related to the requirements of the job and less uneven in its effects than comparable alternatives. A number of the white firefighters then sued, claiming that it was discriminatory to discard the test after the fact just because the high scorers were too pale. Bracket the question of how Sotomayor, as a circuit court judge, should have ruled. Clearly as a policy question, most conservatives seemed disposed to side with the firefighters, and in general conservatives have been highly skeptical of “disparate impact” standards. If the standards are facially neutral, and were not chosen with any pernicious intent (the argument runs), we should let the chips fall where they may. Sounds fairly compelling to me.

So it’s a little odd to see folks like Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol casually talk about Elena Kagan’s “discrimination against the military” during her tenure as dean of Harvard Law School. All Kagan did, after all, was enforce Harvard’s preexisting rule requiring firms wishing to recruit through the school’s Office of Career Services to certify that they did not discriminate by sexual orientation. (This is not the same, incidentally, as “banning recruiters from campus”—the military did continue to recruit on campus via a student group.) It was a neutral rule that applied to any company that wished to avail itself of the Office of Career Service’s assistance, from which the military would have required a special exemption. Kristol clearly didn’t think much of the logic of “disparate impact” in the Ricci case, so why is he so quick to adopt it here? There are many good reasons to be worried about Kagan, not least her apparent fondness for an expansive conception of executive power, but a commitment to even-handed application of the rules is not among them.

In his post this morning, “Kagan on Military Recruitment,” Cato adjunct scholar Mark Moller touches on Cato’s 2005 amicus brief in Rumsfeld v. FAIR, which he co-authored when he was with us as editor-and-chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review – a duty he performed splendidly before moving off to the legal academy. In mentioning the brief, however, Mark says that he recalls that the position it took was controversial within Cato, that it might still be, and that Cato’s legal shop might take a different view were the case presented today.

I don’t recall that the position we took was controversial within Cato, but then it was five years ago, memories fade, and much has happened in the meantime, including the filing of a brief just three months ago that nicely complements the earlier position we took. In Rumsfeld v. Fair we argued that the government could not condition a private university’s eligibility for federal grants, as the Solomon Amendment did, on the university’s giving up one of its rights, namely, its right to freedom of association. The law school plaintiffs, citing the military’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, sought to exclude military recruiters from campus. Pursuant to their nondiscrimination policies, that is, the law schools sought to discriminate against those they thought to be wrongly discriminating. In our brief we took no position on the policy Congress had set for the military (that question was not before the Court), nor on the rights of public universities in this matter – nor did we address the question whether Congress, under its raise-and-support-armies power, could directly order schools to admit recruiters, as the Court ultimately held.

Well we now have the public school version of that issue before us, and the Court, in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez. And our brief in this case, written by Cato adjunct scholar Richard Epstein, argues that a public law school – Hastings, in this case – cannot condition the receipt of benefits it extends to all other student groups on CLS’s giving up its right to freedom of association. CLS, a private student group, excludes nonbelievers from its membership, which is its right. As a public institution, we argue, Hastings must treat all equally.

Thus, the principle in the two cases is the same. Private parties, pursuant to their right to freedom of association, may discriminate, whether we agree with their grounds for doing so or not. Public institutions, which belong to all of us, may not discriminate except on grounds narrowly tailored to their functions. Unfortunately, in numerous respects, that’s not our current law. For more, see here.

Confirmation hearings are a “vapid and hollow charade”, or at least that’s what Elena Kagan wrote fifteen years ago. National Review Online invited me to contribute to a symposium on how Republican senators can keep the coming hearings from becoming such a charade, with results that can be found here.

The First Amendment has been among Kagan’s leading scholarly interests, and yesterday in this space Ilya Shapiro raised interesting questions of whether she will make an strong guardian of free speech values. Eugene Volokh looks at her record and guesses that she might wind up adopting a middling position similar to that of Justice Ginsburg. As Radley Balko and Jacob Sullum have noted, the departing John Paul Stevens ran up at best a mixed record on First Amendment issues, so the overall impact on the Court is far from clear.

Kagan’s other main scholarly topic has been administrative and regulatory law, and Nate Oman at Concurring Opinions warns that everything in her career “suggests that she is intellectually geared to look at the regulatory process from the government’s point of view.” Oman took an advanced seminar she taught, and brings back this cautionary report:

It was an interesting class, mainly focused on the competition between bureaucrats and political appointees. In our discussions businesses were always conceptualized as either passive objects of regulation or pernicious rent-seekers. Absent was a vision of private businesses as agents pursuing economic goals orthogonal to political considerations. We were certainly not invited to think about the regulatory process from the point of view of a private business for whom political and regulatory agendas represent a dead-weight cost.

I’m not the only one who finds Kagan’s exclusion of military recruiters at Harvard wrongheaded, even while agreeing with her in opposing the gay ban. Peter Beinart made that argument in a widely noted post at The Daily Beast last month and now has a followup. Former Harvard law dean Robert Clark is in the Wall Street Journal today (sub-only) with an argument that Kagan’s policy was a continuation of his own and represented the sense of the law faculty as a whole. Emily Bazelon points out that the recruitment bar was overwhelmingly popular at top law schools at the time, an argument that as Ramesh Ponnuru points out may raise more questions than it answers. And Ilya Somin cautions against assuming that the wrongheadedness reflects any specifically anti-military bias.